Severance and the paradoxes of grief

The second season of Severance ends as it began: with Mark S running through the endless white corridors of the severed floor.

In those closing moments, though, he’s running for a different reason, and in a different way strangely, perhaps hysterically, hopeful than he was 10 episodes earlier.

With this finale, Severance has made clear it is absolutely not doing that.

We do, sort of, find out the answers to some much-asked questions like what the sinister numbers mean, or what those goats are for.

Severance is hardly the first TV episode to so powerfully portray the experience of bereavement.

The 2001 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode The Body hauntingly depicted the emptiness and unreality of the moments after the world implodes.

In 2015 ’s Heaven Sent, Doctor Who dramatised the incapability of grief, the way all the clever tricks you use to make it through the day cease to work.